In the future we will all be spies, and we will all be spied on

BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera made the comments at WIRED Security
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“In the future there will be no secrets. In the future, we will all be spies, and we will all be spied on.”

It’s not a particularly optimistic view, proffered up by the BBC's security correspondent Gordon Corera at WIRED Security. But it’s also not one that will feel unfamiliar to anyone aware of the breadth of information private companies collect on us every day in exchange for their free services. The information government intelligence services request access to, and hackers can steal and sell.

Corera is fairly well-placed to make the prediction, however. Having covered national security as a journalist for 12 years, he recently looked into the origins of cybersecurity while penning his book Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies. He pointed that from the very beginning, computers were “born to spy”.

“The first programmable computer, Colossus at Bletchley Park, was built to aid spying. Computers generally are useful for and vulnerable to espionage.”

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The internet, on the other hand, was “born to share and not to secure”.

“A network of academics built it to share their information, with no understanding that it would scale up to what we do now. The internet is hardwired in this insecurity.”

There are examples everywhere of how these origins have impacted modern national security - Corera points to a British hacker involved with Islamic State being killed by a drone; the FBI trying to force Apple to decrypt one of its devices used by one of the San Bernardino shooters; and alleged Russian hackers taking over a French TV channel and calling themselves a cyber caliphate.

But Corera focused on another side of how the internet has impacted modern espionage, at a more human level: spies. Intelligence services are using data to recruit new spies - they are analysing engineer databases, finding out what these people are like by looking at social media, enabling accidental meetings by finding out online what places they frequent.

“All of the techniques of data analytics can be used against you,” however, he pointed out. “You get the sense of this existential battle - it places you at quite high risk, but data is also a huge enabler for what they do.”

Using a false passport, for instance, is made more complicated due to biometric data. And going undercover means building a backstory online as well as off.

The result of this transformation, says Corera, is that “people who worry most about data are privacy advocates and spies”.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK